"Writings, ramblings, rants, etc." – A reader

A rusty showboat

I’m confident that I’d be drummed out of the Indonesian military in a New York minute, because in both of these cases, I would probably be the lowly corporal shouting from the back of the press room, “Hey, chuckleheads! Yes, you! Stop taking the goddamned recorder out of the goddamned water! Jiminy Cricket on a velocipede!”

When a DFDR or CVR is immersed in water after an accident, it must be kept stored in water after recovery, and not pulled out and posed with every time a photographer is in the vicinity. Why? Because once immersed in water – especially salt water – the internal components are highly susceptible to corrosion, which begins the instant the recorder is taken out of the water. That’s why the NTSB’s FDR and CVR recorder recovery manuals both state:

4.5. If the CVR is recovered in water, it shall immediately be packed in water (fresh, if possible) and not be allowed to dry out.

This is not the first time I’ve seen this sort of grandstanding. It’s good that they finally found the two recorders in about a hundred feet of water, but novice air crash investigators need to stop boasting and playing about like this. This is real life, not some Dingleface update upstaging your friends’ dull lives. Treat it as such. If you don’t know the rules, find out about them. Hey, look, someone’s linked them for you a graf or two upstream.